Month: June 2018

Nintendo

Super Smash Bros Ultimate headlined a content-packed Nintendo Direct presentation ahead of this year's E3. Doubts about the popular fighting game resembling a glorified Wii U port were put to rest with an announcement of every existing Smash Bros character returning—and tons of tweaks big and small coming to the whopping 65-character roster. Smash Ultimate will launch on Nintendo Switch on December 7, 2018.

Every third-party and DLC character from prior games, including Metal Gear Solid's Solid Snake, Street Fighter's Ryu, and Final Fantasy VII's Cloud, will join Smash Ultimate—as too will the fan-favorite weirdo pair of characters Ice Climbers. ("I kind of hope you aren't expecting too many new challengers," series creator Masahiro Sakurai added before revealing one more new character on top of Splatoon's Inkling: Metroid's popular, winged-and-fanged boss Ridley.)

Enlarge (credit: Team 17)

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—Nintendo kept the hits and surprises (er, no-longer-surprises) coming during today's E3-affiliated, Switch-crazy Nintendo Direct video special. In addition to major first- and third-party announcements, it also included a long-awaited look at a sequel to one of 2016's biggest indie surprises: Overcooked 2.

Weeks before Nintendo's unveil, the game's handlers at Team 17 invited select members of the press to sit with a largely complete version of the co-op cooking sequel. It didn't take long for my opinion of the gameplay to transform from "why isn't this an expansion pack?" to "awesome bona fide upgrade."

A “throw” button!

3d render of DNA spirals. (credit: Image courtesy of NIST)

Today we’re launching something of an experiment, connecting a podcast to the written pages here at Ars. For at least a few weeks, we’ll be running episodes of my tech- and science-heavy podcast in installments near the typical US lunch hour. To keep lunch from going long, we've got the episodes chopped up into 30-ish minute segments. Opening installments will go up on Tuesdays, then we’ll keep posting daily until the episode is complete (typically two to four days). If you prefer to read rather than listen, we've got transcripts available.

Your host will be me, Rob Reid—a long-time entrepreneur who now podcasts and writes science fiction. The name of both my podcast and my most recent novel is After On. The podcast consists of deep-dive interviews with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists. My guests have included Rodney Brooks, the father of the Roomba and countless other robots; UCSF neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, whose clinical video games fight ADHD and dementia and have been featured on the cover of Nature; and the ever-controversial Sam Harris, going deep into his personal history and opining up about terrorism.

I talk about my podcast’s approach in the introduction to today’s segment, and I won’t repeat myself here. Instead I’ll give you a quick preview of today’s installment: it features the legendary bioengineer and genomicist George Church, whose Harvard lab is one of the most celebrated fonts of innovation in the world of life science. As I say in the podcast, George was one of the earliest drivers behind the Human Genome Project. He’s also one of the most prominent co-inventors of the gene editing technology known as CRISPR, and he has co-founded 22 life-science companies (yes, really).

Enlarge / Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton is a leading opponent of Trump's ZTE deal. (credit: Pete Marovich/Getty Images)

Last week the Trump administration announced a deal to lift a ban on US companies exporting technology to Chinese smartphone maker ZTE. ZTE has been largely shut down since the ban was announced last month, because the company depends heavily on Qualcomm chips, Google's software, and other US-made components.

But now a bipartisan group of US senators is seeking to reverse Trump's decision and re-impose the export ban. The Wall Street Journal reports that the legislators have reached a deal to attach a ZTE export ban to the National Defense Authorization Act, a "must-pass" bill that authorizes funding for the military.

Supporters of the amendment include Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer and at least two Republican Senators—Sen Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). In the closely divided Senate, just a handful of Republican defections can be enough to give critics of President Trump a majority.

Enlarge (credit: Disney)

Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey of science readers we ran a couple weeks ago. It will take us some time to think about how to use what you've told us, but we can definitely let you know what you told us about yourself.

To begin with, you're generous. Well over 9,000 of you took the time to fill out the survey, and about 3,500 of you shared additional details via a text field. Public opinion companies would kill to have access to a test group like that.

Can’t get enough

Sort of. They would if you weren't so... weird. One of our hopes was that we might hear from people who aren't very interested in science but might occasionally read an article if it was pitched the right way. We didn't. There were nine people who said they were either indifferent to science news or avoided it. That's not nine percent of 9,000—it's nine total. Nearly 70 percent said they were very interested in science, and another 23 percent said they do it for a living.